Novelist Hilary Mantel says girls ready to have babies at 14 by sticky

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Post date: 04.03.2010

GIRLS are ready to have babies at the age of 14, according Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel claims

The 57-year-old writer, who won the award last year for historical novel Wolf Hall, blamed society's "male timetable" for forcing young women to suppress their "instincts" and delay motherhood, the London Telegraph reported.

"Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society's timetable," she said.

"I think it is that men's lives have set the timetable. Men reach a sort of sexual peak when you are 20, a social peak when you are 40.

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"There is this breed of women for whom society's timetable is completely wrong."

Mantel was unable to have children following an illness in her 20s and she said that part of her regretted not starting a family before pursuing higher education.

However, her comments were immediately condemned by campaigners, who said that Britain already had the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe.

Sue MacDonald, of the Royal College of Midwives, said: "Girls of that age can be physically mature, but not necessarily psychologically mature."